ER Visits Due to Alcohol Use Raise the Risk of Death Within a Year
People who seek treatment for an injury in the emergency department and are intoxicated or have an alcohol use disorder are five times more likely to die in the next year than people in the general population, according to new research that analyzed more than 10 million California ER visits.“For every 100 injured patients who were intoxicated or had alcohol use disorder who came to the emergency department, 5 of them died within the next year, versus 1 out of 100 in the comparison population. That’s a big difference,” says the lead researcher, Sidra Goldman-Mellor, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor in the department of public health at the University of California in Merced. The findings were published on December 12 in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.“These findings…